The bank I mainly use for my daily banking needs does not offer that many examples of great customer experiences. The two reasons why my family continues to use that bank are the high number of ATMs in the area where we live and a very customer-oriented branch advisor. Our most recent interaction with that bank (but not with that advisor) delivered yet another example of “great” customer service across channels, an experience that will likely cause us to look for a new bank. The chances that this yet-to-be-determined bank can offer better cross-channel capabilities at least at some point in the future are not bad at all: Many financial services firms are evolving beyond using just a single channel to get in touch with their customers (see the figure below).

Good customer service is the result of the right attention to strategy, business processes, technology, and people management. This seven-post series focuses on customer service technology and explains the what, why, how, and when technology questions.

Part 6 focused on what this analysis means to customer service managers.

In this final post, I will focus on where do you go from here, now that we know what the core customer service technologies are, how mature they are, and what their business value is. I recommend a three-step process:

On the one hand, I saw highly prescriptive, standardized, catalog-type collections that fit well together but which are rather boring and maybe don’t make the best of my ramshackle old house. On the other hand, I visited a lot of junk shops with interesting but incompatible pieces, ranging from a Victorian birdcage (really!) to an Art Deco lampshade. It made me think about the challenges that application development and delivery professionals face in formulating application portfolio strategies.

When should they single-source and when should they choose a best-of-breed strategy? For which applications should they consider SaaS solutions? What is the best way to use systems integrators to help reach a target portfolio at the lowest opportunity cost?

Join us at Forrester’s Forum for Application Development and Delivery Professionals on October 17 and 18 in Indianapolis, where my colleagues Paul Hamerman, Liz Herbert,and Jost Hoppermann will be discussing their research into application portfolio strategy. and answering questions about applications portfolio transformation such as:

What’s the difference between application upgrade and transformation?

Where do you find the help you need for applications portfolio transformation?

If technologies like mobile, social, and in-memory analytics are so important, why don’t we deploy them ourselves? Why are we waiting for vendors to bundle it with their releases?

I’ve lived in my house for a long time and it’s time for a refresh. Over the last several months, I planned what needed significant investment and what only needed a cosmetic update. A couple of things were evident: new windows, for one. I was confident that the rest could be handled with some spackle and a new coat of paint, especially a pesky crack in the ceiling in my kitchen. Easy repair. It looked good, but shortly the crack appeared again. Maybe it was the spackle, or maybe I painted too soon. So, I bought different spackle and a nifty new spatula to try it again. A couple of weeks later, the same crack reappeared. In the meantime, I called my contractor and asked him to give me an estimate for new windows. He did and told me I could fix them for far less than I’d budgeted. I was thrilled. On his way out, I asked him about the crack in the ceiling. After poking it, he immediately went up to the bathroom that sat over the kitchen. When he returned, he held an old elbow pipe that had corroded. Climbing back up, he pushed a little harder on the crack and a small but steady stream of water flowed out. What I thought was a quick and easy fix turned into a significant repair. I lacked visibility into the real problem and it cost me more in the long run. We see this in organizations every day. They plan strategically, but execute in a “get it done” manner that may cost them a lot more than the value it brings.

This is my fourth time attending Oracle OpenWorld in as many years. The show drew a large crowd this year, topping 60,000 attendees. I focused on customer service sessions highlighting the Oracle RightNow, Oracle Siebel, and Oracle Knowledge (InQuira) products. I went to high-level vision sessions, road map sessions, and customer testimonials. I also spent a lot of time talking to systems integrators that have recently deployed these solutions. This year was by far the most enjoyable conference experience. Here is why — and keep in mind that all of my comments are about its customer service portfolio:

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Good customer service is the result of the right attention to strategy, business processes, technology, and people management. This seven-post series focuses on customer service technology and explains the what, why, how, and when technology questions.

Many companies are focusing on delivering differentiated customer service experiences to their customers. But enhancing the quality of service delivery is a really difficult proposition given the complexity of the contact center technology ecosystem. Here are five recommendations to help you out:

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The future of online advertising is absolutely mobile, says Forrester Principal Analyst and Research Director Melissa Parrish. The problem is that mobile advertising today is just a compact, less complex version of traditional web advertising. That’s why many advertsiers say that it’s not as effective. Something has to change to make mobile advertising more effective. That something, says Melissa, is that mobile advertising must be driven by the user’s in-the-moment context. In this episode of Forrester TechnoPolitics, Melissa analyzes the mobile mindshift and the current state of mobile advertising.

Ok, confession time: Those who know me well know my upbringing holds a deep dark secret. Yes, I was born in West Virginia, and grew up in Kentucky. Yes, my dad worked in the coal mines (OK, he was an electrical engineer, and only went down below once every couple of weeks . . .). On finding out my origin story, my college roommates took to calling me “hick” (I think they still do when I go back for reunions). I gotta say, it still amazes me how quickly y’all zips right back into my patois when I’m around like-minded individuals. But I gotta tell ya, there’s a lot to like about where I grew up: horses, bourbon, and basketball come to mind. And then there are the feuds and rivalries: UK versus IU (we don’t acknowledge Louisville); Maker’s Mark versus Jack Daniel’s; Hatfields versus McCoys. Where I grew up, we don’t mind a good brawl every now and then . . .

And that’s exactly what I’m seeing in our 2013 Forrsights Developer Survey when it comes to how developers prioritize the mobile platforms they develop for. In the survey, we asked all developers about the types of application development technologies they’ve worked with in the past 24 months. Of the 1,611 North American and European developers we surveyed, 478 (just under 30%) indicated that they had worked with mobile apps or mobile web sites. We then asked those developers a variety of questions about how they are using mobile technologies. One question we asked them was how they prioritized their development efforts across different form factors and operating systems (see Figure 1). The overall data is interesting, but so is the data inside the top-line stats:

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that big data is only about analytics for business intelligence. Big data is the fuel, and predictive analytics the engine, that will power the next generation of predictive applications, as I wrote in a prior post (Predictive Apps Are The Next Big Thing In App Development). Sure, there are absolutely many exciting use cases in traditional business intelligence. But the same knowledge, insight, and predictive models gained from big data analytics can transform boring business and consumer apps with the ability to design and develop predictive apps. What are predictive apps?

Predictive apps anticipate user intent and provide the right functionality and content on the right device, at the right time, for the right person by continuously learning about them.

A Home Depot Example Of A Predictive App

Let’s say your toilet is leaking. You go to Home Depot and buy a tank repair kit. You get it home and realize that you need a special screwdriver, so you make a second trip to Home Depot. You go home and find that the screws you tried to reuse were stripped after years of decay. You make a third trip to get the screws. Finally, you can fix the toilet successfully — but it took you three trips to Home Depot. Multiple trips to Home Depot stores is pain point for many customers.